A conventional approach for listening to a sound program or digital audio content, such as the sound track of a movie or a live recording of an acoustic event, through a pair of headphones is to digitally process the audio signals of the sound program using a binaural rendering environment (BRE), so that a more natural sound (containing spatial cues, thereby being more realistic) is produced for the wearer of the headphones. The headphones can thus simulate an immersive listening experience, of “being there” at the venue of the acoustic event. A conventional BRE may be composed of a chain of digital audio processing operations (including linear filtering) that are performed upon an input audio signal, including the application of a binaural room impulse response (BRIR) and a head related transfer function (HRTF), to produce the headphone driver signal.